Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

Oh, no.

As we shall see.

How right

I should have been to keep away, and let

You have your innocent-guilty-innocent night

Of switching partners in your own sad set:

How useless to invite

The sickening breathlessness of being young

Into my life again.

Denis Cornford, omnium consensu, was a fine historian. Allied with a mind both sharp and rigorously honest was a capacity for the assemblage and interpretation of evidence that was the envy of the History Faculty at Oxford. Yet in spite of such qualities, he was best known for a brief monograph on the Battle of Hastings, in which he maintained that the momentous conflict between Harold of England and William of Normandy had taken place one year earlier than universally acknowledged. In 1065.

In the Trinity Term of 1994, Cornford — a slimly built, smallish, pleasantly featured man — had taken sabbatical leave at Harvard; and there — somehow and somewhere, in Cambridge, Massachusetts — something quite extraordinary had occurred. For six months later, to the amazement and amusement of his colleagues, the confirmed bachelor of Lonsdale had returned to Oxford with a woman who had agreed to change her name from Shelly Benson to Shelly Cornford: a student from Harvard who had just gained her Master’s degree in American History, twenty-six years old — exactly half the age of her new husband (for this was her second marriage).

It is perhaps not likely that Shelly would have reached the semifinal heats of any Miss Massachusetts beauty competition: her jawline was slightly too square, her shoulders rather too strong, and her legs perhaps a little on the sturdy side. Yet there were a good many in Lonsdale College — both dons and undergraduates — who were to experience a curious attraction to the woman now putting in fairly regular appearances in Chapel, at Guest Nights, and at College functions during the Michaelmas Term of 1994. Her wavy, shoulder-length brown hair framed a face in which the widely set dark brown eyes seemed sometimes to convey the half-promise of a potential intimacy, while her quietly voiced New England accent could occasionally sound as sweetly sensual as some enchantress’s.

Many were the comments made about the former Shelly Benson during those first few terms. But no one could ever doubt what Denis Cornford had seen in her, for it was simply what others could now so clearly see for themselves. So from the start Shelly Cornford was regularly lusted after; her husband secretly envied. But the couple themselves appeared perfectly happy: no hint of infidelity on her part; no cause for jealousy on his.

Not yet.

Frequently during those days they were to be seen walking hand-in-hand the short distances from their rooms in Holywell Street to the King’s Arms, or the Turf Tavern (“Find Us If You Can!”), where in bars blessedly free from jukebox and fruit-machine Shelly had quickly acquired a taste for real ale and a love for the ambience of the English public house.

Occasionally the two of them ventured farther afield in and around Oxford; and one evening, just before Christmas 1994, they had taken the No. 2 bus from Cornmarket up to another King’s Arms, the one in the Banbury road, where amid many unashamedly festive young revelers Cornford watched as his (equally young) wife, with eyes half-closed, had rocked her shoulders sensuously to the thudding rhythm of some pop music, her black-stockinged thighs alternately lifted and lowered as though she were mentally disco dancing. And at that point he was conscious of being the oldest person in the bar, by about twenty years; inhabiting alien territory there; wholly excluded from the magic circle of the night; and suddenly sadly aware that he could never even begin to share the girlish animality of the woman he had married.

Cornford had said nothing that evening.

Nor had he said anything when, three months later, at the end-of-term Gaudy, he had noticed, beneath the table, the left hand of Julian Storrs pressed briefly against Shelly’s right thigh as she sat drinking rather a lot of Madeira, after drinking rather a lot of red wine at dinner, after drinking rather a lot of gin at the earlier reception... her chair perhaps unnecessarily close to the Senior Fellow seated on her right, the laughing pair leaning together in some whispered, mutual, mouth-to-ear exchange. Perhaps it was all perfectly harmless; and Cornford sought to make little of it. Yet he ought (he knew it!) to have said a few words on that occasion — lightly, with a heavy heart.

It was only late in the Michaelmas Term 1995 that Cornford finally did say something to his wife...

They had been seated one Tuesday lunchtime in the Turf Tavern, he immediately opposite his wife as she sat in one of the wooden wall seats in the main bar, each of them enjoying a pint of London Pride. He was eagerly expounding to her his growing conviction that the statistical evidence concerning the number of deaths resultant from the Black Death in 1348 had been wildly misinterpreted, and that the supposed demographic effects consequent upon that plague were — most decidedly! — extremely suspect. It should all have been of some interest, surely? And yet Cornford was conscious of a semipreoccupied gaze in Shelly’s eyes as she stared over his left shoulder into some more fascinating area.

All right. She ought to have been interested — but she wasn’t. Not everyone, not even a trained historian like his wife, was going to be automatically enthralled by any reevaluation of some abstruse medieval evidence.

He’d thought little of it.

And had drunk his ale.

They were about to leave when a man, in his early thirties or so, walked over to them — a tall, dark, slimly built Arab with a bushy mustache. Looking directly into Shelly’s eyes, he spoke softly to her:

“Madame! You are the most beautiful lady I see!”

Then, turning to Cornford: “Please excuse, sir!” With which, picking up Shelly’s right hand, he imprinted his full-lipped mouth most earnestly upon the back of her wrist.

After the pair of them had emerged into the cobbled lane that led up again into Holywell Street, Cornford stopped and so roughly pushed his wife’s shoulder that she had no choice but to stand there facing him.

“You — are — a — bloody — flirt! Did you know that? All the time we were in there — all the time I was telling you—”

But he got no further.

The tall figure of Sir Clixby Bream was striding down toward them.

“Hell- o ! You’re both just off, I can see that. But what about another little snifter? Just to please me?”

“Not for me, Master.” Cornford trusted that he’d masked the bitterness of his earlier tone. “But if...?” He turned to his wife.

“No. Not now. Another time. Thank you, Master.”

With Shelly still beside him, Cornford walked rather blindly on, suspecting (how otherwise?) that the Master had witnessed the awkward, angry scene. And then, a few steps later — almost miraculously — he felt his wife’s arm link with his own; heard the wonderful words spoken in her quiet voice: “Denis, I’m so very sorry. Do please forgive me, my darling.”

As the Master stooped slightly to pass beneath the entrance of the Turf Tavern, an observer skilled in the art of labiomancy would have read the two words on his smoothly smiling mouth:

“Well! Well!”

DISCIPLE (weeping): O Master, I disturb thy meditations.

MASTER: Thy tears are plural; the Divine Will is one.

DISCIPLE: I seek wisdom and truth, yet my thoughts are ever of lust and the necessary pleasures of a woman.